Research

Book Project: Emotional Counterpublics- Feeling Racial Justice

I am currently turning my dissertation into a book project, in collaboration with community-based organizations. Emotional Counterpublics is based on three years of critical feminist, community-engaged ethnography in two Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian American youth-led, racial justice organizations in a diverse city in California.

Why Emotions?

Emotions are an engine of racial and intersectional inequality—whether the emotions of Black and Brown youth are derided, or emotions of white decision-makers upheld as authoritative fact. And yet, social science theories of social movements have shied away from investigating how emotions matter in racialized resistance.

What are emotional counterpublics?

Emotional counterpublics are spaces where youth harness emotions to redefine and expansively enact social change: such as expansively re-imagining strategies for racial and educational equity and healing wounds from structurally induced trauma.

What do emotional counterpublics look like?

There are three main dimensions of emotional counterpublics that knit together the micro and the macro by transforming the self, interpersonal dynamics, and engaging in structural change:

First, emotional counterpublics encourage youth to recuperate a damaged self by addressing “paradoxes of the personal and political.” Youth activists can become politically empowered and recuperate erased selves, but fighting for systemic change can also exacerbate stresses of everyday survival amidst structural violence. Group strategies to manage these dilemmas, such as self-care and reclaiming time for rest, form new movement cultures oriented towards holistic well-being instead of working to exhaustion in the name of justice.

Second, youth and staff forge emotional prefigurative norms of interpersonal dynamics that embody care and support. These norms can be categorized as collective emotionalities or democratically created agreements on how to be together, spaces for sharing unfiltered thoughts, and affirmative practices that encourage affective capital.

Third,  these practices translate into systemic and institutional transformation that redefine robust schools and cities. Groups validate youth’s emotions (elsewhere dismissed or even punished) as critical knowledge about trauma engendered by carceral landscapes and anemic city and school budgets. They mobilize this emotional knowledge to assess the “success” of institutions in alternative ways (e.g. beyond test scores) and to propose policies and material investments that instead center youth’s well-being.

Why should we care?

Youth show how emotions are not just instrumental, but central to social, paradigmatic transformation. This study expands sociological understandings of dilemmas and possibilities for rectifying racialized intersectional inequalities and to move beyond the social movements’ literature inclination to focus on structural change aimed solely at the state.

Youth show that emotions are central to forging social relations not wholly defined by injustice. Embracing youth’s emotional knowledge, groups value their complex humanity and create new epistemic paradigms. These emotional counterpublics constitute a paradigm shift unsettling our most deeply held assumptions about what is needed for social change, particularly racial justice.